JENKINS: North County is ground zero for football's evolution

As the Super Bowl, memorable for sideline sibling rivalry, a long power outage and a thrilling finish, fades into the record books, one debate question remains in play:

Should any parent who allows a boy to go out for football have his/her brain examined?

President Obama, the nation’s sports-fan-in-chief, said he’d have to do some heavy soul searching before letting a son of his suit up in pads. On the other hand, Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner, said he would allow his son to play. (As it is, both men have girls so their views are academic.)

No matter what decisions individual families make, we all know that football in America is too huge, too fundamental, to fail, at least for the foreseeable future.

Coaches like Escondido’s Chick Embrey and Vista’s Dick Haines are local Rockne-level legends, rock-jawed titans who led North County high-school teams to CIF championships.

When I think of the power of football to electrify a community, I don’t think of Baltimore, drunk on the glory of the Super Bowl victory.

No, I think of Fallbrook in December of 2000, the last month of the last century.

It was a Hoosier-like feel-good story for the ages. The Warriors, rural kids led by a big-time coach who’d opted for the pace and passion of a small town, won the CIFs for “Brooktown,” the industrial-strength moniker on the backs of fire-engine-red jackets. The remote town, which borders Camp Pendleton, walked with a Marine swagger. They were the champions of the world.

In the 20th century, football was loved as a violent contact sport that built character, raised (or dashed) community spirits and, in many cases, shredded knees.

“An old football injury.” You heard men say it all the time. Like an old war wound, the revelation conferred a sense of martial glory. You could hear the marching bands, the cheering crowds.

One of the smartest things I’ve heard said about football was on a talk show in which Steve Inskeep of NPR observed that injury, even if permanent, is integral to the reason young men play football.

It’s part of the bonding sacrifice for the team, he said, like a battlefield purple heart. If you’re not hurt in some way, you’re not playing hard enough. That embrace of pain is intrinsic to the sport’s Spartan ethos.

And yet, despite the sport’s embrace of injury, it’s North County‘s singular fate to have authored two cautionary tales that outline the unendurable sorrows of football as we are coming to know them in the 21st century.

In Junior Seau, the celebrated Oceanside demigod whose brain was scrambled by repetitive blows that did their dirty work slowly, over years. His suicide ripped a hole in the NFL’s argument that the game is evolving to protect players’ brains.

And then there’s poor Scotty Eveland of San Marcos, the Mission Hills High player whose tragic story called into question the ability of coaches and trainers to monitor the warning signs of catastrophic brain injury.